There's no doubt that there's a benefit to the employee, but for corporations to adopt this there has to be a measurable benefit to the company as well.
I do think there is one clear benefit as measured in the article - employee retention. It's an extremely strong incentive to stay with the current company, and domain knowledge gained over decades really is a competitive advantage if your employees commonly have it.
What remains to be seen though are if the efficiency gains are good enough to justify less hours. Are employees more productive? That's the question that remains to be answered or objectively measured here. Less burnout and better mental health means higher quality work for sure, but is output as a whole better with a 4 day work week versus a 5 day work week? That's what shareholders will care about more than anything else.
In the mid aughts, I worked at a company that put ROWE (results oriented work environment) into practice. This approach basically meant you could work whenever you wanted, as long as you were meeting goals and metrics. There was a list of metrics you had to meet before being eligible for it. They kept it in place for two years and nothing really changed. Devs were still meeting their metrics and the company was still doing well, but when the old VP who put ROWE in place left, the first thing the new VP did was take it away along with some other perks we had. Myself and about seven other devs left within the next 3-4 months.
I'm currently working for a large corporation who went through several cycles of trying to get people to come back to the office after C19 slowed down. After three or four versions, they finally gave up and put an optional (hybrid) model in place. It was interesting to hear the stunned VP's glowing about the increased productivity and the company had two of its most successful quarters going into and coming out of the pandemic. I'm guess seeing those results made it easier for them to allow people to work from home more easily.
Some anecdotal evidence for your retention theory. Since my current company allowed 100% WFH, our team has had barely any turn over and at least three of the teams I worked with have also have little or no turn over as well. It would stand to reason you probably have a good point about retaining people when you allow them a little more freedom to do their jobs.
I'm with a large organization (government, military) that also implemented a hybrid model under covid and decided to keep it going. But not a day goes by that someone doesn't scream for it to end. We have too many people "working from home" all the time and never getting done the stuff that cannot be done from home. Is the server not responding after the recent power outage? Too bad. The guy to turn it back on only comes in Monday-Tuesday. They put the real property maintenance people on a hybrid model. No joke: The plumbers and electricians still "work from home" half the week.
"Hello, this is General Smith." "Sir, ... um .. you are answering your own phone?" "Yup. My EA is working from home thursday-friday and we cannot get the secure phone to forward calls to her cellphone." "Did you talk to IT?" "It is friday. IT works remote on fridays." "How about I come to your office?" "Please do, I'm all alone here."
That sounds mostly dysfunctional and not really a WFH issue.
A reasonable company would have some rotating in-office IT or at the very least an oncall that goes to wherever the server is to fix it.
Pretty much the same thing.
As someone who is a big proponent of WFH, one thing I must still agree to is that organizational and cultural issues that existed prior to WFH at usually just worse in WFH. If your employees are so disfranchised that their install scripts to wiggle their mouse while they watch Netflix the battle is already lost.
> If your employees are so disfranchised that their install scripts to wiggle their mouse while they watch Netflix the battle is already lost.
That would be a lot of companies and workers out there, dare I say the vast majority even.
Believe it or not, many workers don't actually enjoy their work, their company, their boss or their job, but they put up with it because housing in expensive and it was the least horrible job they could find with the highest pay they could land, enabling them a lifestyle upgrade, even if they don't care for the work itself, so of course they'll take every opportunity they get to slack off and watch Netflix if they can.
Expecting all your workers to be fully invested and committed on work while on the clock is an exercise in futility and something no company past a certain size will ever accomplish because everyone just looks after themselves and their own self interest first, screw the company and their shareholders. And the companies know this, hence the culture of micromanagement, spyware, RTO, etc.
That's why start-ups and small companies can accomplish things the likes of Google can't, because they're formed mostly of motivated people who care about the product and the mission first and foremost, while the likes of Google are full of coasters who are there just to make as much money as possible with as little work as possible while the gravy train lasts.
And there's absolutely nothing wrong with people looking after themselves. A lot of of the people committed to a mission are going to end up getting screwed. (Not everyone, but probably most.)
Screwed in a monetary sense, perhaps. But this is just one thing people gain from work. For some it's not even that important.
Ok, so just consider a world where jobs paid no money. How many people do you think would have a job? 10% of the amount now? 1%?
Even if there are some very rare individuals that go to work primarily for companionship or for personal fulfillment that doesn't mean it's even worth bringing up in a discussion like this
This is a bit of a misdirection because it equates jobs, which are work done for someone else, with all work. I am sure that the majority of people would still do something that can be considered work in a world without jobs.
It's obvious that few people are going to subordinate themselves in a world where they don't get paid for doing so, and if they did it would look more like volunteer associations (only emergency response involves much hierarchy, most volunteers are only loosely associated with the org, individuals choose which shifts to turn up to, local leaders are elected and view it as a burden rather than a privilege) and less like work (you don't get to choose anything).
Edit: I should add that I'm in no way against jobs, I just think that people who are doing largely unproductive work for free are still working, even though it'd be better for everyone if they were getting paid to do something more useful.
If money is not that important, then it must have been important to them at some point for them to have obtained and retained it.
I agree. I started out mission driven, now I'm a coaster after getting screwed.
There are a lot of people that don't enjoy their jobs, but do the work because they're getting paid to do it. You seem to assume that anyone doing their job _only_ because they're being paid to do it will _not_ do their job if they can get away with it (even though they're still being paid to do so). Not everyone is a horrible person. Plenty of people will continue to do their job even if they could lie and not do it; because they agreed "if you pay me, I will do my job".
I've had times where I wasn't enjoying my job, but I still did the work... because that's the agreement I had with the company I worked for. And, like a lot of people, I wouldn't see it as acceptable to scam the company I work for.
>There are a lot of people that don't enjoy their jobs, but do the work because they're getting paid to do it.
How's that different from what I just said?
Overall you do make it sound like you condone this, I got the same read as the person you are responding to...
I don't condone it, I'm just saying it how it is in reality.
Eh scamming companies is fine, especially as they get larger. Companies scam employees whenever they get the chance.
Classic tragedy of the commons and hypercompetitive destructive incentives which hurt everyone in the end, sort of like this- https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=PRz54V7rU4U
For startups is it perhaps easier to be intrinsically motivated in the company's success because there is likely to be more financial benefits?
When large established companies complain about productivity and lack of employee commitment, the answer seems very obvious to me... Swap platitudes, certificates of recognition and motivational speeches with tangible financial incentives.
If the executive wants everyone to come into the office 5 days a week, then offer a 25%+ pay rise and watch people flood in
I don’t think this is true for the vast majority of startup employees though. Maybe the founders get some crazy return 10 years down the line if they’re lucky. Most everyone else would earn the same or less if there is a successful sale as they’d have at a “normal” company. And if there is no successful sale, they’d have earned less.
Since I joined the workforce, I encountered something like two or three people doing actually nothing at work. And once they are identified, I just know that I can't expect any output from them and just do without them.
It's the opposite that I'm confronted with daily : people who are absolutely terrible at their job and who constantly try participate. Not only I know that I have to triple check their outputs, but I also have to come up with fake tasks to give them so that they are not constantly asking for things to do or worst, doing disasters on their own initiative. They consume a lot of time and energy from the productive members of the team, while having no positive output for the company. It's like daycare for adults. And given that everybody is paid at the end of the month, I have nothing but love for unproductive (in the eyes of the company) people who take care of themselves.
I'd rather have both those people doing what they enjoy outside of work instead of forcing themselves to be here because governments and corporations are saying that you are not a member of society if you are not selling your time to capitalism.
Ya. We had that. We had 10+ people doing trouble tickets 8am to 4pm across more than a dozen buildings. They worked hard, but were never actually done. There was always a priority list. Now they work half the week from home. Stuff is piling up and we are begging for more non-at-home IT staff to be hired.
I think you missed the point—your organization is completely dysfunctional at this point and hiring won't change that.
Based on your description you don't have a WFH policy, you have a policy that incentivizes not working at all. What makes you think that these hypothetical new hires are going to actually work while the rest of their department doesn't? What sane person would put up with that treatment?
>I think you missed the point—your organization is completely dysfunctional at this point
Would you be surprised to hear that most companies in the world are just like that?
HN readers are in a bubble where they can afford to be picky on where they work choosing companies that fit in their belief system in terms of organizational efficiency and work culture, instead of just choosing the least horrible job they can find with the best pay, like the other 99% of the people in the world.
I said nothing about the ratio of dysfunctional organizations to non-dysfunctional, nor did I encourage OP to switch jobs or even try to change something in the org. All I said is that their organization is dysfunctional and hiring new people into the dysfunctional teams will do absolutely nothing to fix that.
>that doesn't make it not dysfunctional
I never said that's not dysfunctional, I said most companies ARE dysfunctional in one way or another, and it's something most workers who've been around the block a few times learn to live with eventually, since they prioritize hobbies, family and having a roof over their heads instand of finding that ideal Goldlacks company that's never dysfunctional in any way, because that doesn't really exist.
Especially traditional companies tend to be insanely dysfunctional when it comes to IT and SW engineering in general. And most people know this but still plenty choose to work there and put up with that dysfunctionality instead of fighting to change it, because like I said, it's just a job that pays the bills, not a personal identity, and a lot of the people in the real world aren't as fussy about this as HN is.
Again: I didn't suggest anyone fight to change anything or switch jobs. All I said is that hiring new people into the dysfunctional organization is going to do absolutely nothing to fix the problems OP is describing.
You're replying to what you imagine people on HN would often say, not replying to me.
You speak a lot about "reasonable" things. The parent probably could have made things a little more clear, but concerning "government, military" work policies it's almost expected a high percentage will be unreasonable.
My employer's IT is in a different country. I'm not sure which. If it matters, that's an organizational problem, not a WFH problem.
At the rate things are currently changing, I won't be very surprised if non-trivial server capacity gets located in orbit thanks to some successor to Starlink.
This will make remote work mandatory, even if it still can't fix all the possible issues.
Why would that make remote work any more mandatory than it is with 'the cloud' or data centres?
Going to space to fix them is very hard.
(Only due to your comment did I realise I was ambiguous, I meant remote work specifically for the IT department would be mandatory, not everyone in general).
It could still be office-based though, sure technically remote from the server, but so are the web servers software engineers develop for typically, sometimes even their development environment is. I don't think that really factors into remote (WFH) vs office working at all, at least from an employer's perspective. Maybe it makes it easier to work remotely, but certainly doesn't necessitate it: you can work from anywhere, and that can still be the office.
Your worklocation is mir and it's you that goes remote, you don't go remoting. Just like a drill rig. ;)
But only mandatory in the sense of distance to the equipment - it still won't stop some managers from wanting them all corraled into an office somewhere.
Your IT should always be remote. A laptop in the office is not any different from a laptop out of the office.
It definitely feels like most people complaining about wfh have no friends and work is their entire life. I honestly do not understand how anyone can pretend they get anything done, while also being constantly interrupted or having conversations about what they're doing this weekend, or such and such sports team last night etc. Like... just get the work done and move on, jeez, it's work, not a social club. Ending wfh so you can force people to hang out with you is weird.
I was always curious - in fully remote IT (especially one located in another state/country), who does the actual on-site visits? Say, a PC part has to be replaced or a new laptop has to be deployed.
For the deployment I guess you can use something like ImmyBot or Intune, but at some point someone has to be there and connect a new machine to the internet/intranet. How does that work in practice?
How often is something like that actually needed, though? Once a month?
So they fly someone once a month? I can see how it gets expensive.
In practice, you have one or two IT guys in office, and the rest remote (could be in India if the work is not classified).
Maybe if you are working at Google, with infinite budgets and gleaming-new machines everywhere. But we have old stuff. We have phones that cannot be managed remotely. We have desktop computers that cannot get up and walk between offices unaided. We have fiberoptic wires that break when 60+yo buildings shift on their foundations. We have UPSs that cannot change their own batteries. We have antennas exposed to the wind/rain/snow. We also have innumerable systems that are either too old or too classified to be managed from a laptop at starbucks. None of this stuff can be fixed from home.
Anyone who doesn’t have power on after cycle and a network attached power cycle shouldn’t be allowed to employ people.
I'm really curious as to how ROWE works in practice for software developers, because the I'm extremely dubious.
In software development, there is usually an "infinite amount of work" to be done, so the important thing is to prioritize well as a lot of that work will never get done. But what does it mean to say "you've met all your objectives"? If you say "great, I finished all my objectives in 20 hours this week, see you at the beach", this company will eventually get killed by competitors who are just as productive yet work 40+ hours a week.
But fundamentally, the idea of "you've met your objectives, now you can go home" just feels like a fantasy in the world of software development.
What do you do during sprint planning meetings if you don’t know your objectives?
But it's not like you complete your objectives and then you say "great, we're all done, let's go home." Every company I've ever worked for had a backlog a mile long, and we knew we'd probably only ever get to 20% of it or so. The whole purpose of sprint planning is to just prioritize the most important stuff to work on for the next sprint, but if the teams capacity increases you'd pull more stuff in.
No, the purpose of sprint planning is to specify (more ot less) exactly what you plan to do this sprint. Usually the best case scenario. You make your best effort to finish the things you outlined, sometimes you manage to do it, sometimes you don’t, but why would you ever try to do more than you planned to do? If you’ve done the tasks, you’re done, period, go relax, grab a beer, wait till the next sprint. You’ve literally done your job. Why in the world would you want to “pull more stuff in”?
That’s how I’ve done it, and have seen it done in the last 7 companies I worked at.
Your reasoning is so foreign to me. The only way it makes sense if you are speaking as a manager.
Well, to each their own, but that has never been the case in any of the companies I've worked at. In fairness, over the fast 5 years or so more and more the companies I've worked at have used Kanban over sprint planning, because usually the "estimation" part of agile (i.e. the cards, the voting) has proven to be the most useless piece of agile.
I have no idea how metrics would be measured unless the work is always the same and trivial.
In my job, every problem seems to take a random amount of time. It might be the thing I'm assigned is trival and done in 1-2 hrs. It might be it would be trivial but it pointed out an issue elsewhere than needs to be fixed first. It might be trivial but the CI was down for 6hrs. It might be trival but requires some other library to roll to a new version and the roll broke something else. It might look trivial but turns out to need a non trival refactor to work.
I ran into that last one yesterday where I started on an issue that seemed like it should be trivial, in an object with different options than it currently has. These objects are cached by their options since they are heavy. The code that gets an existing or new one is 5 levels deep. It creates them from a factory but the info this new issue needs needs to query the factory to figure out the creation options. So, what seemed like a 10-15 min change is going to be several hours to decide how to surface or pass that factory to/from the top level
the point being, from outside management is going to see different levels of work. It's not as trivial as "created N widgets an hour" nor is it as trivial as "lines per hour"
I feel like there could be lots of unintended consequences with people only taking the smallest tasks or whatever to avoid taking tasks that take longer or to find ways to account things so it looks like they're doing more, etc
This is exactly why I oppose any dashboards with amount of completed tasks per employee.
This just gives wrong ideas to the team.
It’s interesting and encouraging to see this working in the real world. I think most “leaders” are concerned about having to come up with what people, especially software engineers, should be getting done in X amount of time, which I sympathize with… but clearly it’s doable. Perhaps the concern is that high-performers will produce less, and low-performers will be canned, only for the high-performers to have to pick up the slack, or there just be a net negative in total work produced in X amount of time because some engineers have been fired for performance but there’s no one to replace them and others aren’t allowed/able to work more to compensate.
Do you think the lack of turnover might be affected by the current macroeconomic factors? It feels like lots of people have been holding onto their jobs for the last 18 months for this reason.
I’d happily take a 20% pay cut for a 4 day work week, if it was offered.
And would you work as much unpaid overtime as you would with a salaried 5 day work week job when pressured to by your boss, owner and peers?
I never have been pressured by my boss to do unpaid overtime.
Good for you!
That is what it would devolve into.
I think that's common in Switzerland. They call it 80% contracts.
Similarly in Norway.
It's "sort of" what I've done, only last time I changed jobs I told recruiters it'd take 20%-30% more for me to come into the office full time, and pro-rated below that.
I would too but only after I raise my base rate by 25%. If I'm on a salary and have project deadlines it's the same thing anyway.
This is very common in the Netherlands.
I'm told it's a legal requirement for companies to provide that on request here in Germany, though I've never actually tried that yet, don't know any caveats.
The work week went from 6 days to 5 and economy growth didn’t stall (when people were waaay less productive)
My bet is literally nothing will change if we go to 4-day work week.
Can’t say about others but my productivity goes way up with an extra weekend. I am way more rested and eager to do some work in Monday.
Reducing the number of days worked per week per individual increases (relative) overhead costs, including administrative costs, benefits (most notably including healthcare), and capital costs (because everything is being used less, but still devaluing). These are all real changes with real impacts.
Also of note, the increase in these costs from going down to 4 days will be substantially larger than the prior one (due to the smaller dividend).
Capital costs spent do not go up. An opportunity for saving exist. One extra day means less electrical costs. Admin costs remain static. These costs do not change unless you are hiring someone for that one day.
The costs are not going up substantially or at all for most 9/5 businesses
Capital expense is ~= depreciation, which is inversely proportional to the amount of work performed with a given capital asset.
Why would depreciation increase with less usage? Wouldn't the opposite occur? Chairs last longer. Copier would last longer.
I suspect we'd see a bunch of change. A difference of when we moved 6 to 5 days is in those times most business were closed on the weekends + generally people were more tied to one company for longer term. Plus 2 days off is very different than 3 in terms of alternate work opportunity.
From that a likely issue is a steep increase in people having second jobs so they work a 4 day job and a second 2/3 day job.
I suspect the 4 day week will work well for people with good salaries and market power, but encourage working class to 'work the weekend' in alternate jobs resulting in lower downtime.
For this I'd actually like a 4 day week but with it either more restricted business opening on Sunday type thing or significant wage multiples over 3 day weekends to encourage time off vs the 24/7 economy.
I suspect a lot of the people yearning for 4 day work weeks wouldn't actually want to return to the days when most stores and other institutions were closed on Sundays.
As somebody who lives in Germany where everything is closed on Sundays, uh, it really isn't that bad. It's fine, actually. I'll take 4 day work weeks happily.
As someone who went to school in a state where almost nothing was open on Sunday at the time it was pretty annoying given that I was usually pretty busy (or what passed for it at the time) the other 6 days.
These days I wouldn't really care because I have a lot of flexibility.
4day work week won't do magic by itself. The company committing to it must also apply the necessary modifications and seek innovation to tap into this productivity well.
It's like in the Industrial revolution when kids (!!) shift were lowered from 18 hours to 12-8 hours. Adults that were assisted by kids also couldn't maintain the same 18 hours shift and for the factories to maintain productivity they had to implement innovations. And would you look at that, the average textile factory today is orders of magnitude more productive and efficient than that of the 19th century.
Conditions for factory workers in the US haven't improved because it turned out to be an optimal way to improve productivity. It's because of worker movements demanding it again and again.
Those productivity innovations you mention would've come either way. In other countries with worse working conditions and even less labor power than the US, factory owners reap the benefits of applying such productivity innovations AND the increased output of longer working hours than is generally tolerated by US workers.
From the parent comment:
This is only true in a world where workers are entirely subservient to their masters.
Oh sure, don't get me wrong. I am not a techno-positivist that believes innovations will save us from evil. That was only to illustrate how a change in working policy has to go alongside technical and cultural adaptations.
These worker movements are crucial to keep workers from getting both pressured to produce more AND work longer hours.
Got it.
The parent’s line about a company needing to maintain or increase productivity in order to make an improvement to working conditions is one that only those truly part of ownership should be making. Especially when it’s never said so in both directions: if productivity improved (through automation or otherwise) then the workers shouldn’t have to work as long hours. Only actual owners get to work less if they wish to in wage labor business. And it is their privilege to demand workers increase or maintain productivity if they wish to work fewer hours.
Also large organizations could have smaller facilities by using staggered schedules.
Now you're hoteling though which people complain about as well.
What I have heard is that you can please some of the people all of the time and all of the people none of the time.
I also think the USA is marching towards making the gig economy the new normal so fractional employment will be come normal.
And some people are fine with that. I know freelancers and consultants who work for multiple companies (generally remotely) and they wouldn't have it any other way.
If most companies become 4 day work week, that would be the new floor and not a perk no more?
You might still have 5 day work week employees who get paid more but to them the perk is money/earlier retirement.
Mission accomplished. Otherwise what's the point of increasing productivity? If we can get the work done in less time, we should be able to work less. In an ideal world, we would work as little or as much as we want and be compensated accordingly.
That's true for all perks: if all firms offered the same perk, that becomes the new floor. But this does not stop companies from offering perks.
domain knowledge gained over decades really is a competitive advantage if your employees commonly have it
I’m not so sure. On the one hand, it seems nearly tautological. Yet, so much of the comp structure and general attitude towards employees in big tech seems to incentivize job hopping every few years. I would prefer not having to do that, but my hand is forced.
It's pretty clear to me that deep knowledge of how the company works and the historical quirks of how things happened, and how the tech-debt works, is considered of only small value to a typical company. I've seen countless examples of people in such positions being discarded without a thought during layoffs.
Additionally, having deep expertise in a particular technical area can protect you somewhat during a layoff, but also makes you easier to define a replacement for if there is more that one of you.
Companies will get what they pay for. They pay for short term gain.
Well, sure, I think that's a given. This is also, for example, why companies pay their employees money in exchange for their labor. The measurable benefit to the company is that very few people would work for free.
Thats a very Murican way to look at it. You know, workers Can also just demand it, worked for a lot og stuff in Europe. Like 5week vacation minimum. Unlimited paid sickdays, Paternity and maternity leave etc.
The idea that everything has to be a net positive for corporations is silly. We are a society of people, and corporations have to be a net positive for our society not the other way around.
Here's the thing.
If you come in with low-mid trust and say "Expectations are 9-5, 5 days a week, in office" that's what you'll get.
If you come in with high-trust and say "four day workweek, flexible hours, remote" you may well get 5-6 days a week most weeks and 7 days a week in crunch times, still with high morale.
People are fearful of the latter approach because if the wrong people are hired, it can absolutely be abused. The flipside is that the former approach will seem stifling to the right people.
I have to wonder about that. There has been data for years now, confirmed via Covid that work from home not only works but saves companies millions in rent/bills/equipment and that doesn’t even include things like cheaper insurance rates due to having less people on the premises. And yet companies are chomping at the bit to get people to return to the office.
There seems to be a fine balance CEOs and board members want to hit between saving money and ensuring they have their boots as firmly placed on their lessers as possible.
This assumes that the company and employees must have adversarial priorities. This is only true if that’s how the company wants to be structured
Employee owned companies have no such adversarial structures
The fact that a large number, not all, of billion dollar companies are not employee owned, is not a proof that it’s the optimal way to run a company. It’s only optimal for Capital
In fact most companies are employee owned if for no other reason than they are small LLCs you don’t know the name of but are, for example, driving your FedEx packages around.
I worked a 4 day week for over a year while the pandemic was going. I'm not sure about total output, but per day, I was definitely more productive since everyone had different days off.
I got paid for 1 day LESS, so I eventually went back to 5 days. I'd rather get paid for a full day of work, while we all slack off a bit.